Could this be too much for Boeing? John Barnett, a former employee of an American aircraft manufacturer, died of apparent injuries “self-motivated” In a hotel parking lot in Charleston, South Carolina. He died on March 9, 2024.
The former Boeing quality controller was in the middle of a lawsuit against his former employer at the time. After his retirement in 2017, he became a whistleblower two years later, revealing problems with aircraft production at his factory. When he raised his concerns about the safety of the Boeing 787 Dreamliner, he filed a lawsuit against the manufacturer, accusing it of defamation and hindering his career.
The aircraft, which was announced in 2007, was an immediate success for airlines looking for low-energy aircraft. The South Carolina factory where Barnett was working quickly faced a shortage of skilled workers and production delays, exacerbated by the backlog of orders. Deployed in 2011, the global fleet of 787s was grounded for the first time a little over a year after a battery fire broke out on a Japan Airlines plane.
Defects throughout the production chain
After compensating its customers for this grounding and fearing that rival Airbus, which was about to launch its A350, would catch on, Boeing transferred this pressure to its factory… to the detriment of quality.
John Barnett significantly discovered metal shards (produced when employees screw in fasteners) that could cut the flight control cables—which, he believed, could have consequences. “catastrophic” If these shards penetrate the wiring. He later claimed to have seen employees attaching parts from scrap bins (in other words, garbage) to the plane. It also revealed that 25% of oxygen masks malfunctioned during emergency tests. Finally, in January, he noted cases where inspectors had only two hours to find defects in used parts—insufficient to ensure their quality.
Despite Boeing’s denial of these allegations, an investigation conducted by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) in 2017 ultimately proved John Barnett to be correct on some of them.
The manufacturer is currently the subject of a new series of investigations following several incidents on its airliners since January — the most recent dating to Tuesday, March 12, when a New Zealand-Australia flight suddenly lost altitude. In January, the fuselage of an Alaska Airlines plane collapsed mid-flight, forcing it to make an emergency landing. Last week, the FAA gave Boeing ninety days to come up with a comprehensive plan for a solution “Systemic Quality Control Problems” Production control deficiencies were revealed after the audit.
